Arrowsmith advocacy

Last week, Debbie Gilmore, the Arrowsmith program's Australian representative, distributed the email addresses of people wishing to form an advocacy group to bring an adult Arrowsmith program to Queensland.

I'm keen to work with others to see how we can progress this. To that end I've emailed the group, as has one other in the group.

The policy of the Arrowsmith organisation is to not make public the discussions they have with any educational institutions considering the program until they have formally committed to the program and/or are happy to have that made public.  Advocates are not bound by that policy because they do not represent the Arrowsmith organisation.  However, I see the prudence in adopting the same position, so in this blog I'll write only in general terms about such advocacy.

The exciting news is that two more Australian schools have now agreed to offer the program:

• Silkwood School on the Gold Coast
• Mosman Church of England Prep in Sydney

The Arrowsmith website lists both Participating Schools and Prospective Schools.

Mind Up

A few weeks ago I attended a SPELD seminar presented by Sheryl Batchelor, the Program Director of the Shaping Brains Project funded by The Benevolent Society. 

I had previously not considered SPELD for A-One because many of its clients have dyslexia, and that is one area where A-One does not have a problem.  However, I had spoken to Sheryl late last year before embarking on A-One's brain training program, when she had advised me to be careful to use only evidenced based programs, and I was keen to meet her in person.

The seminar was about the Mind Up program, developed by the Goldie Hawn Foundation, in response to the number of children suiciding after 9/11.  The program helps children manage their self-regulation. Sheryl  first came across the program when she visited the Arrowsmith school in Canada about 6 months ago.  Mind Up is incorporated into the Arrowsmith program to help students manage the frustration they may feel when trying to maintain the sustained effortful attention to brain exercises. A lack of ability to self regulate can often be a student's first learning disability.

After seeing the program first-hand, Sheryl is keen to bring the Arrowsmith program to Brisbane for primary children and adults - to enable a family approach if that's what's required. After speaking with Sheryl after her presentation I emailed her to ask how I can also help bring the Arrowsmith program to Brisbane.

No writing!

I woke A-One an hour earlier this morning and let him know the time for brain training.  I mentioned that I wanted him to try some alternative problem solving games, those that did not involve arithmetic, so that we could see how his problem solving goes when it's not about maths.

He brought up the login page at my request. After he worked through the games, grumbling that whoever wrote them is mentally challenged, we looked at his results. No PBs today; in fact he went down in 3 of the games.  However his speed is now over the 50th percentile at 52.6!  Overall he is at the 16.5th percentile.

When he completed the set games, I asked him to choose one of the non-maths problem solving games.  He had a choice between shapes and words, both of which required him to discern the hidden rule. He chose the shapes.

He read the rules of the game and saying it still didn't make sense he proceeded to play anyway.  The game requires the player to guess whether a shape fits the rule or not, so the first couple of tries is trail and error to discern the rule.  However when he got a 'X' on subsequent guesses, he consistently wanted to go back to the start.

Mum: You don't need to go back to the start each time you get one wrong.

A-One: I can't get any wrong.

Mum: It doesn't matter whether you get it wrong, because that's how you find out what the rule is.

A-One: No, I can't get any wrong.

Nevertheless, he seemed to be getting the hang of it, but wouldn't play it again.  I'll be very interested to see how he goes over the next week, as long as he's willing to add the game to his daily list.

We then took up the clocks exercise to a familiar refrain. 'This is a waste of time.  I have better things to do,' as he sat down at the table.  He was willing to try 2 clocks only, taking a while to work them out and making several errors.

Mum: Where did you get the 47 (minutes) from?

A-One: It's correct!  That's what I say it is!

Mum: Let's count them up.

A-One (sighing): OK. It's 52.

After the clocks, we took the first couple of paragraphs from the Inquirer section of last weekend's The Weekend Australian.

A-One: I'm only reading as far as I want to.

...

Mum: Where did you read to?

A-One (without waiting for me to read): There.  It's saying that the government and people are spending as if nothing bad is going to happen to the economy, and the Prime Minister is saying Australia has a good economy.

Mum: OK. Now I want you to write that down.

A-One, quite vociferously: No! No! No! I'm not going to write it down!

Mum: OK.  I'm just letting you know that writing it down in your own words will be one of our future exercises.

 

 

 

Well do I remember the challenges A-One felt at writing his assignments when at school.  I recall one of his teachers wrote one of his assignments while he dictated.  She knew he knew the work and could see that writing it down was a barrier to his succeeding. This year's neuropsychologist's report also recommended something like Dragon Dictate if he needed to write assignments.

 

However, that's the compensatory approach. The Arrowsmith approach is to exercise, exercise, exercise the weak cognitive function.  I just need to find the right level of challenge so that he doesn't refuse.



5-handed clocks

With A-One being turned off the clocks exercise, I re-read Norman Doidge's summary of the Arrowsmith school approach. A-One had been zooming through the 3-handed clocks, and had elected to go straight to Legendary level for his latest X-Box game, so I thought he might respond more positively to a greater challenge.

I decided to create a page of 5-handed clocks with the hands already on them.  That meant that A-One had to read the times rather than write the times.  Where the Arrowsmith school uses 1/60th second for the 4th hand, I instead used milliseconds and microseconds on two 'sub-' clocks within the main clock, because milliseconds and microseconds have practical application. I showed them to A-One after I had printed them out, and he once again stated emphatically that he wasn't going to do them.

I let that go so that A-One could do his Lumosity training first.  I noticed that he's starting to use the 'pause' button on some of the games. Even though the image disappears during a pause, it gives him time to think.  Also for one of the games, whenever he made a mistake, instead of continuing on with the game he went back to the start each time.  So it seems to me that he is becoming 'hooked' on achieving good scores.

He's now over the 15th percentile overall, and his speed is over the 45th percentile. Memory and attention are around the 20th percentile, and flexibility a bit lower than that.  Today he went down in problem solving, to less than the 2nd percentile.  I've told him he needs to relearn his tables and number facts to improve on this one. 

When he and his sisters were young, I used to play songs of tables in the car to school every day, and once upon a time he knew them all. At school the children weren't drilled on their tables like we were when I was at school, and I don't think any of my children would have learnt their tables but for those songs. For them it seems to have been use it or lose it.





I raised the new clocks exercise again:

A-One: No! I don't need to do them! I'm not going to do them! Two hands are all you need to read a clock ... I'm going to the toilet.

Fifteen minutes later (I measured it this time), he came back to resume his computer game.

Mum: Can I just show you how these clocks work, without you doing the exercises?

A-One: Alright.

I explained a millisecond, and a microsecond.

A-One: What do you need those for?

Mum: They are usually used in science, in laboratories, and sometimes to measure how long it takes to access data on computer discs.

Using the first clock as the training example, he made an error reading the hour hand but was able to correct himself when I pointed it out.  He was willing to read the time on the second clock too.

Mum: How about the next one?

A-One: No! No more today!

Mum: How many milliseconds in a second?

A-One: 1000

Mum: How many microseconds in a millisecond?

A-One: 1000

Mum: Fantastic! You know, you're not slow in picking this up. Do you remember when you first started this only a couple of weeks ago that you didn't even know how to read the half hour? And look what you can do now! All you need is practice so that you can do it quickly. Like swimmers - most people know how to swim, but it's those who train and train who swim really fast.

By that stage I was talking to one ear - the other was already under the headset.

A random act of kindness

A-One's laptop died today.  He did his brain training in the study, drawing my attention to the cafe (memory) game where he's surging forward.  Only two PBs today, but his overall BPI is now almost at the 10th percentile for his age group, which is a good advance on when he started.

Mum: Did you have music going?

A-One: Yes, but I'm not paying attention to it.

Mum: Did the music have lyrics?

A-One: Yes.


As he was sitting at the computer, he mentioned that he gave some money to a couple yesterday near his work.

They were asking people on the street for money. From Toowoomba, they had a sick baby and were just back from the hospital. Having borrowed a car which had run out of petrol, they couldn't raise the owner. A-One gave them $10.

A-One: That was kinda like a random act of kindness wasn't it Mum?

Mum: Yes, it was, and very good of you.  Do you think they were genuine?

A-One: I don't think they were playing me, Mum.  She looked really worried. The baby was in a pram, although I didn't quite see the baby.

...

Before we started the clocks exercise we talked about a daily routine for his brain training.  He is still unwilling to agree to a set time even though he follows a pretty consistent routine from 2pm onwards: shower, pack his bag for work, eat, spare time, clean teeth, head off to the bus.

Mum: So what about setting a time for brain training?

A-One: Well, clearly it needs to be before 2pm.  But I can't say a time, because there are other things I want to do too.

Mum: How much time do you want to allow for the other things, so that we can work backwards to figure out when you need to wake up?

A-One:  I don't want to talk about this - it's wasting time.  Let's just get this over and done with so I can do other things.

He whizzed through one page and would go no further.

Forging new neural pathways requires significantly more than 20-30 minutes per day.  At this stage, if I mention the 3-4 hours per day that is spent at Arrowsmith schools, I expect I'd see the heels dig in big time.

It's about when you don't know how to do something

After I came home I woke A-One for today's brain training. 'Just a minute!' he said.  That's his favourite phrase when he's called for dinner too; we often finish before he arrives.

First we attended to some banking - we recently set up his internet banking and he's getting the hang of it quite well.  He remembered a call centre operative's instructions from the other day and could identify each recent transaction in his statement.


His online training went well again today.  He gained 4 personal bests out of 5 games, and his chart is still showing improved scores.  Even when he made a mistake, he seemed to know it before the game alerted him. Only one of his recorded cognitive competencies is still in the 1st percentile, and his memory and speed are still his best scores.

No protest from him when we resumed the analogue clocks work. I suggested he review the work we did yesterday, and he spent several seconds (sometimes up to 6 or 7 seconds) looking at each clock face where he had drawn the hands yesterday.  I asked him some review questions and talked about 'to' and 'past' the hour. 

For today's clocks, 10/20 to- and past- the hour, and 5/25 to- and past- the hour, counting in 5s would be an advantage, so I checked that he could do that, which he had no trouble doing.

On looking at the 10/20 page:

A-One: You've 'mixed up' the 10s and 20s times. It would be better if you had put all the 10s together and all the 20s together.

Mum: I could have, but that sounds too easy.  I wanted to challenge you.

A-One: Why do I need to be challenged?

Mum: Because it's only when you have to work at it that you are learning. When you don't know how to do something, that's a really precious time.  It's the very best learning time because it's only then that you can forge new neural pathways.  Once you know something, you're not changing your brain.

A-One:  Silence.

No protests, so I thank god for small mercies.

After drawing the big hand in the wrong place on the first clock, I explained the one complete rotation in 60 minutes again, and asked him to count by 5s up to 60 while tracing his finger through each of the numbers.  He was then able to self correct the first clock. 

He completed the page, sometimes copying the placement of the big hand from an earlier one.  He did them all so well that I told him it's now time for a 30 second celebration dance. He just looked at me, but I did a sitting dance anyway!

A-One: That's all I'm doing today.

Mum: How about just trying the first one on the next page?

He did ... and completed the whole page!

Tomorrow, none of the minutes end in '5'.

Met Barbara Arrowsmith-Young this morning

My husband and I attended a breakfast talk by Barbara Arrowsmith-Young in Brisbane today.

Barbara's talk reinforced to me that the strength of the Arrowsmith program when compared to online brain training is that the Arrowsmith program is carefully focussed on a person's weak cognitive function, keeping it isolated from cognitive strengths which might compensate.  Whereas online brain training is likely to be more general.

I also found the talk very worthwhile in meeting some people in Brisbane who have an interest in this area, including those who have a special interest in any adult programs.  I came away with some business cards to follow up, as well as an Arrowsmith Parent Adocacy Guide - to gain support from schools to implement the program.

Again I came away convinced that evidence based research and results will be important to brain training programs becoming more mainstream.

Analogue clocks

We added a change of scene today to start work on analogue clocks. That's how Barbara Arrowsmith-Young got started on her own exercises, and from the Principal's pack I received from the Arrowsmith school, the description of the brain function improved by this exercise seems to fit A-One.

From what I have read, Barbara put hands on her clocks and drilled herself to tell the time.  Her goal was to improve that part of her brain that understands cause and effect and mathematical relationships.

I'm starting the other way around. I have created pages containing 12 clocks without hands, each with a time underneath represented digitally (A-One knows digital times). The exercise I'm asking A-One to do is to write the hands on the clocks.  In time, we can try it the other way round too i.e. having him read the times represented by the hands.

Page 1: 6 x on-the-hour times, followed by 6 x half-hour times
Page 2: 6 x quarter times, followed by 6 three-quarter hour times
Page 3: 6 x (10 or 20) past-the-hour times, followed by 6 x (10 or 20) to-the-hour times
Page 4: 6 x (5 or 25) past-the-hour times, followed by 6 x (5 or 25) to-the-hour times
Page 5: 6 x (any other number) past-the-hour times mixed with 6 x (any other number) to-the-hour times



A-One was fine with the 6 x o'clock (on-the-hour) times. When we got to the first half-hour time, he was stumped.

I drew diagrams of the large hand travelling round the clock once an hour, and the small hand travelling between two 'numbers' each hour. With assistance he was able to draw the first half-hour time, but his comment was 'Even though it's right, it doesn't seem right.'

By this time, he was slouching in his chair.

Mum: Take three deep breaths - oxygen to your brain helps you stay alert.

A-One: I don't need to do that.

Mum: OK. Stand up and shaaaaaaake yourself about.

A-One: No! I don't need to do that.


Nevertheless, he sat up straighter in his chair. That enabled him to declare that he was doing only as many as he was comfortable with!

As we tried a few more, he would refer back to my diagrams, and ask how many pages there were to go. A couple of times he drew the little hand between the wrong two numbers, but insisted it was between the correct two numbers. I used a ruler to show him where he'd drawn his hands in relation to the numbers, and his retort was 'Even though it looks wrong, it's right!'

We got to the end of the second page ...